


Ben

by thetragedyofcanaan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Attempt at Humor, Bad Puns, Changing Tenses, Experimental Style, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mental Instability, Minor Original Character(s), Out of Character, Pre-Star Wars: A New Hope, Pretentious, Self-Hatred, Tatooine, Unreliable Narrator, old fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-11 00:43:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15303696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetragedyofcanaan/pseuds/thetragedyofcanaan
Summary: Obi-Wan's miserable little while on Tatooine.





	Ben

Obi-Wan finds himself a desert plant as a housewarming gift. Perhaps, had he been a better Padawan, a better Jedi, had he been _enough_ , the chain of events that left him alone, on Tatooine, swindled into buying a common weed at a sky-high price (perhaps a _sky-dark_ price), would have not come to pass.

After years and years of fighting battles in outer space, colder than  
_(I take Anakin as my Padawan learner)_  
mightiest storms of Orto Plutonia, Tatooine’s scorching heat feels worse than  
_(I hate you)_  
ever.

 

Obi-Wan sips his tea – a rather vile substance, no doubt due to the additives it must contain to survive the export to Tatooine, unimproved by the distasteful twang of Bantha milk – and watches dust settle, making the desolate house seem even more so. At times, he feels that the house truly is empty. He does not feel all that present, nowadays, not all there.

The window sash clatters against the wall with maddening rhythm as the sandstorm tries the walls of Obi-Wan’s hovel. He wishes the sandstone overhead would collapse, granting him the exact amount of indignity in death he deserves for his failure.

 

It should be easy to turn his back on the war. Retirement was all he had ever wanted.

The problem arises when the thought that it is all over is no longer reassuring.

Obi-Wan awakens in the middle of the night, sweaty, high on adrenaline.

 _One day, the war will end_ , he had told himself, when he was too terrified to sleep, when ”fear is not the Jedi way” did not settle his trembling limbs, when he was too unsteady to reach the Force.

Obi-Wan thrashes in his lumpy cot, gripped by delusions, and the fact that they have been as such for a while now is _no longer reassuring_.

 

Come morning, when the suns wring their ugly bodies over the horizon, Obi-Wan fantasizes of them burning down, taking all  
(His regrets and what-ifs.)  
this damned heat with them.

Come night, as the moons drag their worthlessness above the endless desert plains, Obi-Wan dreams of forcing his tortured joints through the stairs of his hidey-hole, so he can fall asleep staring at the stars. Let his guilt fade away with the suns beginning their ascent.

The suns and moons set in the West, while Obi-Wan stays, as much as he wishes to go with them.

The desert storm blows sand grains through the open window, scattering the dust packed around the pots filled with dead plants rotting on the windowsill. A whirlwind of sand and rocks has formed outside the door – there is a steady gust of sand blowing in, now. The flowerpot shifts, a millimeter, two, then to a precarious position on the windowsill’s edge, and finally it crashes to the ground. The wind howls and howls in the crevice of the window, yet it cannot outscream the memories looping in Obi-Wan’s head.

 

 _No one is coming for you. No one _could_. You are going to rot in this hole by yourself until the day you die_.

 

The cot of his hovel is well-placed; usually, Obi-Wan awakens to the rising suns’ glare. Yet tonight he is no less tired than he was this time, a rotation ago, when he finally collapsed from exhaustion, as even the Force could not sustain him anymore.

His knees give out as he's getting out of bed, and that’s all it takes for him to resign to a day of ruminating and wallowing. His headache is unbearable. A radiating pain in the right half, a throbbing pain in the left – sparking all over, dwelling behind his eyes, keeping constant pressure underneath his face. Today, the ache of his joints has crawled out from between his vertebrae to raze its way down his spine, spread from his bones into muscle. The pain could be due to exhaustion, starvation, or the Force, for all Obi-Wan knows.

 

When you forget your pride and your morals, fall to the level of the rest of Tatooine's scum, you become just another long-suffering nobody. Mos Eisley became pleasant enough after this change of heart.

Nobody glances twice at the small boy with a tumors on his legs covered with hardened yellow skin, no one feels empathy at their glaucous discoloration shaped by his rotted veins – they give him a wide berth. Obi-Wan can feel the weight of his fading life through the Force. Yet he walks past, too.

He buys another plant – a beautiful aquatic lily, imported from Manaan – just to watch it die.

 _Be careful with it, it’s sensitive_ , the vendor, a kinder man than his previous broker, had said.

 

Obi-Wan opens himself up to the Force, and studies the plant’s suffering as the it tries to bloom under the parched heat of Tatooine. He feels its dehydration as if it is his own. A fallen blossom is like a lost arm, a wilted stem is his paralyzed spine. He feels its pathetic life get snuffed out, and reaches out into Mos Eisley for more. Days on end, he spends laid down on bedding that like sand and rocks. His legs pulsate with sharp yanks of pain and a sense of wrongness, as blood and tissue grow misplaced. The disease develops, coloring his waking thoughts with repulsion, turning his forgotten dreams into haunting nightmares.

 

”Don’t you have parents? Someone, anyone to help you through this?”

”Well, I certainly won’t have anyone or anything now, since I’m about to kick it.”

”…”

”It’s fine, though. Lately I’ve been feeling this presence. It wasn’t creepy, or anything. It was sharing my pain. Not taking it away, that’d be too much to ask for, but it did more than anyone else has.”

 

On a planet of two-hundred thousand, and on a desert planet, no less, you only need to dip in your toes (into the sand) to become overwhelmed by the death rate of its inhabitants. Obi-Wan cannot recount how many times he dies of dehydration on the most remote parts of the planet, how his very soul is eroded by the dreams that lash-wounds dig up, cannot describe the final humiliation of a slave in death.

He has been getting headaches, lately. It is easy to slip into a meditative trance under their influence. It is easier to stagger beneath the horror of the universe. He barely makes it to the grimy and rusted toilet before throwing up. The bitter taste of bile and rot still sticks in his mouth as he settles back into a meditative pose.

His hovel has no mirrors. Obi-Wan suspects it has to do with the sharp dust mixed with sand in his bedding. There must be a story behind that one. Obi-Wan has half a mind to ask after the previous tenant – he could use a good story.

He can see his reflection now, even as the sunlight reflects harshly on the window pane’s smudges. His sunken eyes are framed by deep creases, appearing almost carved into his toughened skin. Its darkened shade does nothing to alleviate the green tinge of his concave cheeks, a sharp relief against the jut of his zygomatic bones. His white hair seems luminescent, aglow with the unforgiving suns' light.

Had his hair truly greyed in a couple of weeks?

 

His bones ache from the moment he wakes up, yet Obi-Wan cannot put two and two together until the sandstorm is at his doorstep. He can hardly see past the window-frame and the sharp edges of glass sticking out of it. He sheds his robes, old, and worn, yet a staunch reminder of his identity – a thing as battered as the very memoirs of it.

The time has come to put Obi-Wan to sleep. Here’s to hoping that sand makes for a softer grave than his mattress.


End file.
